by J. A. Lang
She left this pronouncement hanging tantalisingly in the air, then clapped her hands together. “Right, enough speaking ill of them that deserves it. You wanted to learn about mushrooms, didn’t you?” She darted inside and reappeared in a wool jacket and broad-brimmed hat, carrying a large empty basket. “Then let’s go.”
Chef Maurice saw Arthur glance down at his spotless leather brogues with a look of dismay. The chef himself was wearing his usual steel-capped boots, which the manufacturers claimed were oil-proof, flame-proof, blade-proof, and capable of withstanding the pressure of a tap-dancing elephant in stilettos. A little mud wasn’t going to do them any harm.
They struck out eastwards, with Miss Fey leading the way.
“See here, this is your winter chanterelle,” she said, bending down to pluck up an orange-brown specimen. “They love sweet chestnut trees. Find a good tree and every year you’ll find them in exactly the same spot.” She patted the tree next to her. “People think it’s all about eyes to the ground, but it’s actually all about the trees. This wood is like an old friend. Know your trees, and you’ll know your mushrooms.”
She stooped down again and plucked up another mushroom, almost identical to the first.
“Now this one”—she held out the new mushroom in her hand—“might look a lot like our first one. But see the gills here?” She flipped it over. “The true winter chanterelle has forked ridges. This one doesn’t. We call them false chanterelles. Dangerous little things, can put you in hospital for a week.”
“A risky business,” murmured Arthur, making notes.
Miss Fey turned her sharp eyes on him. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“What is this one?” asked Chef Maurice, squatting down next to a small ring of spindly grey mushrooms with dull brown caps.
“Those are your liberty caps. Eat those, and you’ll be seeing dancing pink giraffes for three days. They call them magic, but can’t see what’s so magic about them myself. They’re a Class A drug nowadays, they’ll lock you up for life if they catch you with them.”
Chef Maurice withdrew his hand.
“Worth much, are they?” asked Arthur.
“Not enough to be worth the trouble to most people,” said Miss Fey. “Not that you’d catch me touching those things for any sum of money. Law’s there for a reason, I always say.”
Chef Maurice cocked his head. There was something in the way she’d said it . . .
“There are other pickers, perhaps, who think different?”
She gave him an appraising look. “Might be. You hear a thing or two. Us pickers, we always have an ear to the ground, so to speak.”
“But it would not do to speak ill of the dead, n’est-ce pas?”
Miss Fey gave him a humourless smile. “You ask a lot of questions, Mr Maurice. You’re not Belgian, are you?”
“I am French, madame.”
“Is that so? I knew a Belgian once, a little fellow. He asked a lot of questions too.”
After another twenty minutes of poking around in the leaf mould, Foraging 101 was deemed complete and they retired to Miss Fey’s cosy front room, which reeked of dried mushrooms and old books. Chef Maurice wandered up and down the bookshelves as Miss Fey clattered about in the kitchen.
The Handy Hedgerow Guide. Tales from the Deep Woods. The Nettle: Rituals, Remedies and Rhymes.
From up in the far corner, he pulled down a thin red volume titled: Annals of European Mycology and Biotechnology, Vol. XIX.
The text was small and dense, written by serious people who knew serious stuff, such as how to deploy a footnote to devastating effect.
Chef Maurice shut the book and placed it carefully back on the shelf.
“Milk, sugar, gentlemen?”
Their host reappeared with a tray laden with a blue-and-white china tea set, a steaming apricot pie and generous slices of lemon poppy seed cake.
“Milk and three sugars,” said Chef Maurice automatically. He then noticed the size of the sugar cube in her dainty tongs. “And two more sugars. Merci.”
They settled back into the well-worn chintz armchairs.
Chef Maurice sought around for a suitable teatime topic.
“I wonder, madame, if you are familiar with the English truffle?”
The cake knife clattered off the tray and hit the rug.
“Deary me, excuse my butter fingers,” said Miss Fey, putting on her glasses and bending down to retrieve the knife. “You were saying— Oh yes, English truffles. Poor specimens, I’ll say, when you think about what you can find elsewhere. We get the summer truffle in some parts, and I’ve heard rumours of a few patches of Burgundy truffles, but those who know of them keep their lips tight, as you can imagine.”
“But none of the black Périgord? And the white truffle of Alba?”
She gave him a steady look from over her spectacles. “I do hope someone hasn’t been pulling your leg, Mr Maurice. We don’t have any of the likes of them in these parts.” She stirred her tea slowly. “I’d know, believe me.”
And that was the end of that conversational vein.
Arthur moved into interview mode, pen poised, while Chef Maurice decided to investigate the maximum of pie and cake that could fit onto a single small plate.
Even so, he kept one eye on Miss Fey, though this resulted in a certain amount of crumb fallout in the process.
As they left, she presented them each with a basket of fresh wild mushrooms. Chef Maurice, in line with his own expectations, got the bigger one.
“My number’s on the card there,” said Miss Fey, tucking it in behind a pile of white puffballs. “Should you be needing a new supplier at some point . . . ”
“What a nice lady,” said Arthur as he manoeuvred the car back down the lane.
“Mmmm.” Chef Maurice looked over his shoulder at the cottage as they pulled round a bend, just in time to see a curtain twitch shut.
He had the distinct feeling there was more than met the eye when it came to Miss Fey.
* * *
They spent the rest of the afternoon driving around the roads surrounding Laithwaites Manor with the windows rolled down, shouting Hamilton’s name.
At least, Chef Maurice did. Arthur pulled his hat lower down on his forehead and crossed his fingers that Brenda’s neighbours weren’t the trigger-happy hunting types.
Eventually, no micro-pigs forthcoming, they drove in silence back to Le Cochon Rouge, Chef Maurice soothing his raw throat with a dose of medicinal cognac.
In the kitchens, dinner prep was underway. Patrick looked up from julienning a stack of leeks.
“A cool box arrived with your name on it, chef. Marked private. I put it in the walk-in.”
It was a small polystyrene container, about the size of a shoebox. Scrawled across the top was the message, For Mr Manchot. PRIVATE.
Chef Maurice levered the box open with a long spatula.
(Ever since the incident with a particularly truculent crab, this had been the official Cochon Rouge policy on opening mysterious packages. Alf still claimed to have the occasional nightmare about crustaceans.)
Inside, he found a handwritten note.
Keep your snout out of business that doesn’t concern you, if you ever want to see your pig again.
Under the note was a shrink-wrapped packet of bacon.
Chapter 12
Chef Maurice jabbed at the frying pan with a wooden spoon. Sizzling fat spluttered onto the hob.
“You’re not actually cooking that bacon, are you?”
Patrick kicked the mud off his boots in the kitchen doorway. Morning light filtered in through the small windows, and brown leaves jumped and swirled outside in the yard.
“And why should I not?”
“How can you be completely sure it’s not . . . Hamilton?”
Chef Maurice lifted up a streaky brown rasher with his spoon. “It is much too large. And from the smell, I conclude this is from a British Saddleback pig.”
“Still, I can’t believ
e you’re eating bacon today.”
“But why not? My grand-père, he owned two horses, for the fields. And my grand-mère still made horsemeat stew every Sunday in the winter.”
“Touching.” Patrick poked his head into the walk-in fridge and noticed the basket Chef Maurice had returned with yesterday. “Are we putting these new mushrooms on the menu?”
“They are not enough,” said Chef Maurice, assembling himself a bacon-and-egg sandwich between two thick slices of country loaf. “Instead, we will make sautéed wild mushrooms with tarragon and chives on sourdough bread for the staff meal. To test the quality, of course.”
“Sounds good to me, chef. Um, do you know if Arthur is coming in for lunch today?”
Arthur had a standing lunch reservation every day at Le Cochon Rouge, and made use of it most days of the week when he was in Beakley and Meryl was out at work. On busy days when all other tables were booked out and they had to give away his table, he’d kick up a huge fuss, claiming to be their best and most loyal customer, then finally agree to eat standing in the kitchens.
“He did not say. What do you require of him?”
Patrick’s ears reddened slightly. “I just needed to ask his advice about something . . . ”
“Bah! A good chef never asks the advice of a food critic!”
“No, no, er, it wasn’t about cooking. Um . . . ”
Chef Maurice looked puzzled, then his eyes lit up. “Ah, then it must be about—”
“I printed out those flyers you wanted,” said Patrick desperately, thrusting a stack of paper into Chef Maurice’s hands.
“Ah, très bien! Most impressive!”
Chef Maurice had no love for modern technology, and to judge by the dents in the old battered desktop computer now collecting dust in his office, modern technology felt the same way about him.
Earlier in the year, Patrick’s short-lived experiment with an online reservations system had ended abruptly when Chef Maurice leant his elbow on the keyboard and accidentally cancelled every reservation across the Valentine’s Day weekend. This resulted in a severe overbooking of tables, and thus a string of highly disgruntled would-be paramours were forced to sit outside in the impromptu ‘decking area’, cobbled together from borrowed garden furniture and a few old picnic benches, while their dates stayed muffled up in their thick coats—not exactly the best scenario for fanning the flickering flames of a nascent romance.
Chef Maurice turned the flyer this way and that. “It is a good picture, non?”
It bore the missive: PIG MISSING. REWARD OFFERED. APPLY AT LE COCHON ROUGE.
Below was a grainy photo of Hamilton, taken by Dorothy on Hamilton’s first day at the restaurant.
“What reward are we offering, chef?”
“That’s depends,” said Chef Maurice darkly, “on in what condition they find my pig.”
“We could offer a three-course dinner for two here at the restaurant.”
Chef Maurice liked that idea. It sounded suitably generous, while having the added benefit of his not having to withdraw any money from his actual bank account.
“Have you heard from Mademoiselle Lucy?”
Patrick looked up in panic. “What do you mean?”
“Eh? About the case, of course! My Hamilton! Have the police any developments?”
“What? How should I know? Why do you think I’d know anything?”
The two men looked at each other in mutual incomprehension.
“I go,” said Chef Maurice finally, “to make a distribution of these papers.”
Arthur had been oddly unwilling to demand a full-page ad from his editors at the England Observer, but offered to help pin up the notices all around Beakley and the nearby villages.
“No word yet from the police?”
“Pah! I telephone them. They say it is under control.”
“Which could mean anything, I’m sure. Still, I suppose they do have a murder investigation going on, which I imagine takes precedence.”
Chef Maurice hammered a flyer onto a nearby telegraph pole.
“Eh? You are saying that until they find the murderer of Monsieur Ollie, they will not look for Hamilton?”
“Well, you can hardly expect—”
“That is intolérable!” He paused. “Still, it gives me an idea . . . ”
They continued their walk through the village, going door to door handing out flyers. Beakley’s mostly retired residents could usually be depended upon to be at home, or visiting someone else’s home, where they sat ready to pounce on the next visitor collecting for charity or selling double-glazing, dragging them in to dispense the latest gossip. They rarely bought anything—apart from the recent case of Mr Evans, who had been quite taken with the Avon lady, and whose newfound interest in rouge was said to be adding a whole new slant to his social life—but this didn’t stop armies of salespeople making their regular rounds in Beakley, sure of a cup of tea and a slice of sponge cake.
Eventually they reached the end of the village and the cordoned-off cottage of Ollie Meadows, and found Mrs Eldridge sitting on a deck chair in her half of the front garden, a tartan blanket across her knees.
“Move out of my way, you’re blocking the view,” she snapped, waving at them with her cane. They obediently stepped aside and watched as Mrs Eldridge applied a pair of binoculars to her eyes and peered at the white van coming towards them. She pursed her lips, whipped on her reading glasses, and made a small entry in the notebook on her lap.
“Traffic control,” she said, waving the little book at them. “I keep telling the council we need some traffic-calming devices in the village. The through traffic has been terrible of late.”
Chef Maurice and Arthur turned to survey the empty road. In the distance, the van trundled off over a hill. Birds tweeted in the still trees.
“And what’s that paper you’ve got there? I saw you both, plastering the whole village with those things.”
They handed her a flyer, which she took and scrutinised as if it were the terms and conditions of a winning lottery ticket.
“So you’ve lost your pet pig, eh? My father used to keep pigs. They don’t make good pets, I’ll tell you that. Always getting loose and raiding the orchard next door, especially this time of year, when the fruit falls and rots on the ground. Turns to cider all by itself. You ever seen a drunk pig?”
They shook their heads.
“Ah, well, you’re missing out, then.”
“I have been threatened, Madame Eldridge,” said Chef Maurice gravely. “They steal Hamilton, they tell me to stay out of Monsieur Ollie’s business.” This wasn’t strictly accurate, but it seemed the most likely business that someone might want to keep him out of.
Mrs Eldridge nodded. “That Ollie had a lot of business that people might want to poke around into, if you get my meaning.”
Arthur and Chef Maurice shared a look. This sounded promising.
“Have you, er, mentioned all this . . . business to the police?” said Arthur.
Mrs Eldridge snorted. “That pretty little blonde police lady wouldn’t know a criminal if he hit her over the head. Kept me out of the house, she did, when they searched his cottage the other day. His half is a mirror image of mine. I could have told them all the places to look.”
“Like, in the back of the wardrobes, under the stairs, below the sink, that kind of thing?”
Mrs Eldridge narrowed her eyes at Arthur. “You been having me watched?”
“Ahem,” said Chef Maurice. “You were speaking of Monsieur Ollie and his business?”
“I might have been.” Mrs Eldridge tilted her head. “But then again, I might have forgotten. My memory plays up something dreadful, it does.”
Chef Maurice nodded. “I, myself, have that problem sometimes. But I think I have a remedy. Arthur, your phone, s’il vous plaît?”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, the smell of caramelised pastry and slow-cooked apples filled Mrs Eldridge’s little parlour room.
/> “Tell Patrick,” Chef Maurice said to Alf, who was red in the face from his sprint down from Le Cochon Rouge, “that we will need another tarte tatin for dinner this evening.”
“Oui, chef,” said Alf, and jogged out of the door.
They sat, balancing their teacups on their knees.
“So first of all,” said Mrs Eldridge, leaning forwards like one about to impart state secrets, “there’s those youngsters that keep coming around.”
“Local kids?” asked Arthur.
“Not from Beakley, else I’d know ’em by sight. They park up in the lay-by, near those fields behind here, and cut across through to the back.” Mrs Eldridge waved her cane towards the rear of her house.
“What are they coming here for?”
“Ah, if I knew that, I might have bothered to tell that police lady. I know they come to pick up something, I see ’em scuttling away with paper bags sometimes.”
“Do you see them exchanging anything?” asked Arthur. “Money and the like?”
“It’s them darn eaves,” said Mrs Eldridge, pointing her cane at the window. “Gets in the way when you’re trying to look out. I can see the back path from my upstairs bedroom, but the way the eaves hang out, can’t see what goes on at the door.”
“A shame, madame,” said Chef Maurice.
“Ain’t it just? I wanted to put one of those little balconies on the back, but the council chap said I wasn’t allowed, it’d be overlooking. I told him, young man, overlooking is exactly what I want it for!”
Chef Maurice made various sympathetic noises.
“But I wouldn’t be bothering with those youngsters anyway,” continued Mrs Eldridge. “Not if you’re after something to do with Ollie’s murder.”
“Why do you say that, madame?” said Chef Maurice, helping himself to another slice of tarte tatin, and making a mental note to try adding a touch of cinnamon next time.
“Got my money on one of those two fellows who’ve been hanging around here.”
“Fellows?” said Arthur.
“Well, the first one, saw him last Friday—”